It’s a question I keep asking myself, as I make my way through this great wide world. What if we turned on the radio, or opened up our iTunes libraries, to find music that expresses more than just beginnings and endings, that reminds us that just to be alive and breathing – something we consider ordinary – is actually extraordinary, and worth singing about?

Let’s be honest. There’s a whole lot of middle in life – some exciting, some dull, some parts simple, some parts complex. But isn’t it all worth exploring in sound, a little more than it currently is?

Hello, by the way! My name is Rena, and I’m so happy you’ve stumbled across this project! I’m a singer, piano player, and sometimes songwriter, whose life is split between Nova Scotia throughout the academic year, and BC the rest of the time. A lot of my musical energy goes into completing my undergraduate musicology degree, but I can’t help but think that there’s so much to communicate and express that has no place in my papers, which are all based on solid fact and reason and logic (at least, I like to think so)! But those things that don’t make it into my papers still deserve to be said and communicated.

I’m also a struggling/lapsed Catholic. Catholics, as many may know, have a season of religious activity called Ordinary Time. And for that Ordinary Time, they have music. I kind of started wondering why everyone doesn’t sing about everything, because I wondered why Catholics should have all the fun. Shouldn’t we all have music for our Ordinary Time?

Because, really, what is ordinary? Breathing, eating, sleeping, drinking, working, playing, loving, creating, feeling isolated, feeling connected, feeling hurt, feeling happy. Living. We all live – so are the things contained in that life, those little things, really all that ordinary? Or are they just a bunch of little extraordinary things that we relegate to being ordinary, because they’re common and connective among us?

Whatever the answer is, it’s those moments, and those things that make up life, that I want to create music for.